Live streaming a gig with high quality end product

hassleham

I'm wondering about trying to live stream a music festival at some point in the future. Just before Christmas I bought an irig stream to allow me to use a mobile phone or webcam whilst taking high quality audio straight from the FOH mixer and this worked really well but I'm wondering about taking it up another level.. I would like better video quality and to be able to move around the festival with the camera for a more immersive viewing experience. 

I'm very confident with the audio side of things but have little experience with cameras or TV. I'd like the stream to look as professional as possible and not just look like a 5 minute bodge job, but I appreciate it will cost money to get it right.

For reference, here's the streamed gig we did just before christmas (which was very much a 5 min bodge job!):


I think the audio quality was good however there was nobody mixing the sound during the gig so the levels were a bit off. We were all spaced out in the room due to covid but im imagining the next stream would look more like a normal gig on a stage, COVID permitting.


So my main questions are:

- What's the most cost effective way to get a fully mobile camera setup which can move around a festival? 

- Could a gopro be used to stream the video and then synced up to the audio, or would latency between video and audio cause problems? (I've heard that gopro's can do this but I've never used one)

- Is hiring in pro equipment an option?

- Would it be worth the additional cost compared to just using a mobile phone with the irig? 


Thanks!

markslade07

I don’t think this falls into ‘cost effective’ but if you’ve not already seen it, take a look at what Rhett Shull and his band are doing monthly on Backstage Live on YouTube. There’s a video before he starts explaining his set up so may be some useful ideas in there.

Best live stream I’ve seen.

maltingsaudio

The problem with live stream and high quality video is the amount of data the camera produces, so you need to hire a “compressor” for want of a better term to handle data stream ( about £600 a day!) I’ve been looking at this and from a noise boys point of view, once you get into the data handling realm of this it’s best to hire a video tech at the same time!

Danny1969

What we did was all set up normally, everything was mic'ed up and then fed into the desk as normal. Then I fed the output of our normal mixing desk into a little desk with USB  (USB audio interface will work to) into a USB hub. Then that fed into an iPhone camera adapter (£25) and put high quality audio straight into the stream. 

Video wise we used Sony's special streaming software which enables video mixing remotely from multiple sources. So we had one master phone at the front filming the band and that phone got the good audio. 

We all set up our own phones as personal cameras and streamed to the Sony software using the Larix ap 

Then our normal lighting engineer video mixed the gig from a laptop using video from all the phones in real time. while our sound engineer mixed in on cans using our normal QU16 mixer. 

I think I showed you this before but in case I didn't this is what was streamed 

https://www.facebook.com/superheroes.rock/videos/1691931117650240. ;

It was all done on 4G, no wifi .... the drummers phone was an older android phone and that struggled but the keyboard players newer Samsung was fine as were all the iPhones

hassleham

Hey @Danny1969 ; thanks for the info. I think I've seen one of your performing solo before but not with a band. That link isn't working though!

@maltingsaudio thanks for that. That'll definitely be out of budget so what would you say is the next best thing?


I've been looking into gopro's as some of the newer models can do live streaming in relatively good quality and also have an audio input which would allow me to connect a battery powered mixer to handle a few mics and and a feed from the FOH when required. 
This seems the most cost effective way so far.. It'd be £300-400 for a GoPro and about £100 for a decent battery mixer. I'm yet to decide whether the improvement from a mobile phone and irig stream is worth that cost though.

PolarityMan

Danny1969 said:

What we did was all set up normally, everything was mic'ed up and then fed into the desk as normal. Then I fed the output of our normal mixing desk into a little desk with USB  (USB audio interface will work to) into a USB hub. Then that fed into an iPhone camera adapter (£25) and put high quality audio straight into the stream. 

Video wise we used Sony's special streaming software which enables video mixing remotely from multiple sources. So we had one master phone at the front filming the band and that phone got the good audio. 

We all set up our own phones as personal cameras and streamed to the Sony software using the Larix ap 

Then our normal lighting engineer video mixed the gig from a laptop using video from all the phones in real time. while our sound engineer mixed in on cans using our normal QU16 mixer. 

I think I showed you this before but in case I didn't this is what was streamed 

https://www.facebook.com/superheroes.rock/videos/1691931117650240. ;

It was all done on 4G, no wifi .... the drummers phone was an older android phone and that struggled but the keyboard players newer Samsung was fine as were all the iPhones

That sounds awesome. Do you think you could get away without additional engineers if you were happy to have a static mix and say jsut rotate the cameras every 5 secs?

Danny1969

@PolarityMan ;
Yeah a static mix with a heavier sound will be fine as generally the 2 guitars and bass will be consistent. With us lot there's horn parts played on the keys and a fair bit of clean guitar and backing vox so generally needs a fair bit of levelling. 

If everyone has an ears mix then you can generally put a compressor on the main bus of the desk before the audio leaves to make it sit loud and steady like program music. 

Switching cameras is the hard bit, what's needed is a cheap alternative to the Sony software because that's around £120 an hour to hire, we only used it because our keyboard player is on the development team and had a load of test hours. 

PolarityMan

oof per hour! didnt realise that. Wonder what can be done with OBS.

mike257

PolarityMan said:

oof per hour! didnt realise that. Wonder what can be done with OBS.

If you're looking to do something super cheap on OBS, there's an Android app that enables your phone as an NDI camera feed. The performance over WiFi isn't the best, but it does work. You could add multiple NDI feeds from various devices, along with any webcams you might have, and switch between them in OBS using Scenes. 

EDIT to add - you can also take a feed from an audio interface in to OBS so can hook up a mixer that way for your audio too.